When you’re encoding a video or converting its format you’ll normally find that you’re presented with a range of options that you can choose from. If you aren’t entirely familiar with video encoding that can be daunting, and most people often make several mistakes as a result.
Knowing some of the more common mistakes that people make when encoding or converting video formats should help you to avoid them:
- Not using the ‘right’ format
As you’re probably aware there is no one-size-fits-all format that is right for every video. Instead the ‘right’ format will depend on how you want to use your video, and should take into account compatibility and compression.
Generally you should try to find a compatible format that provides good compression rates so the file size is as small as possible. However if you’re uploading your video to a specific platform you’ll want to follow its recommended format and settings instead.
- Encoding with higher quality settings than the original video
When you encode and convert your video you can technically increase its resolution, framerate, and bitrate – but you should never do that. As tempting as it may be to increase these settings and ‘improve’ the quality of your video, it simply won’t work.
Suffice to say the quality of the video that you encode or convert can never exceed the original. Because of that all you’ll do if you use higher settings is to ‘stretch’ the original and make its file size larger without increasing its quality.
In some cases the quality may end up worse than the original if you try to do this.
- Altering the frame rate
Unless you’re absolutely sure what you’re doing, you should never alter the frame rate of the video. Adjusting the frame rate and attempting to increase or decrease it can lead to a lot of issues that will affect the quality (or duration) of your video.
Typically people try to alter the frame rate either in an attempt to make the video smoother by increasing it, or to reduce its file size by decreasing it. Neither option will work that well, and for the latter you’d be far better off decreasing the bitrate instead.
As you’re aware of these mistakes, you shouldn’t have any issue avoiding them in the future when you encode or convert video formats. Needless to say it would help if you have a converter that makes it easy to adjust the encoding settings, and you could try Movavi Video Converter for example if you want to convert MP4 to WMV, AVI, MOV, MKV, or any other formats.
All said and done you don’t really need an in-depth knowledge of encoding settings to avoid the mistakes listed above. In fact you just need to focus on the basics and find the right format to use while making sure that you don’t adjust the settings in a way that will adversely affect the quality of the video once it has been encoded.
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